“Bitter, Sweet, Seoul,” a crowd-sourced film about Seoul supported by the city government was released on Tuesday and there are no polished images or preaching about the virtues of South Korea’s capital.

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Instead, the film shows a raw Seoul, with plenty of rough edges. And that’s exactly what the directors and the city’s mayor were looking for.

“With this movie, we tried to show that real people own this city, lead their lives, have fun, and try hard,” Park Chan-wook, who co-directed the film with his younger brother told a press conference.

The project started last August with the aim of boosting interest in the city. People from all over the world were invited to submit their videos of Seoul life, from which the Park brothers created the film.

A scene from “Bitter, Sweet, Seoul”

The finished 63-minute movie was stitched together from 141 clips, selected from nearly 12,000 entries submitted over two months last year. South Koreans were the biggest participants with 6,523 clips, followed by Chinese, Americans, Canadians, and Singaporeans.

Compiling and editing over 160 hours of footage was like doing a puzzle, the directors said. To make the project more cinematically coherent, music played a central force to put all the different pieces together, they said.

A scene from “Bitter, Sweet, Seoul”

“It was worth it, particularly when we found a video that had an image we had been looking for. It felt as if we had discovered a jewel,” said Park Chan-kyong, the younger of the directors in a separate interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The duo, born and raised in Seoul, said the project enabled them to step back and contemplate the city—something they hadn’t done before. The purpose of the project was not to beautify the city but to present it as it is, they said.

Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon agreed that showing glamorous parts of Seoul was not the objective.

A scene from “Bitter, Sweet, Seoul”

“Seoul has a sad history. If we try to project only the good side, it’s not the real thing,” Mr. Park said.

“Seoul is not a place in monotone; It has so many different colors….Having it depicted through this film will ultimately help attract more tourists,” the mayor said.

Sebastian Simon, a 31-year-old French national who was invited by the city to attend Tuesday’s premier of the movie said he was surprised to know that his submissions, which he described as “not really attractive scenes of Seoul,” were selected to be part of the movie.

“It tells me that they were willing to accept both bitter and sweet parts of Seoul as the title suggests.”